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Tech Firms Aren't Just Encouraging Their Workers To Use AI. They're Enforcing It. Published on 2026-02-25T22:30:00Z Tech companies ranging from 300-person startups to giants like Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Salesforce have moved beyond encouraging employees to use AI tools and are now actively tracking adoption and, in several cases, tying it to performance reviews. Google is factoring AI use into some software engineer reviews for the first time this year, and Meta's new performance review system will do the same -- it can track how many lines of code an engineer wrote with AI assistance. Amazon Web Services managers have dashboards showing individual engineer AI-tool usage and consider adoption when evaluating promotions. About 42% of tech-industry workers said their direct manager expects AI use in daily work as of last October, up from 32% eight months earlier, according to AI consulting firm Section. At software maker Autodesk, CEO Andrew Anagnost acknowledge...

Americans Are Destroying Flock Surveillance Cameras Published on 2026-02-25T21:00:00Z An anonymous reader shares a report: Brian Merchant, writing for Blood in the Machine, reports that people across the United States are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras, amid rising public anger that the license plate readers aid U.S. immigration authorities and deportations. Flock is the Atlanta-based surveillance startup valued at $7.5 billion a year ago and a maker of license plate readers. It has faced criticism for allowing federal authorities access to its massive network of nationwide license plate readers and databases at a time when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is increasingly relying on data to raid communities as part of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. Flock cameras allow authorities to track where people go and when by taking photos of their license plates from thousands of cameras located across the United States. Flock claims it do...

Xbox Co-founder Says Microsoft is Quietly Sunsetting the Platform Published on 2026-02-25T20:01:00Z Seamus Blackley, one of the original founders of Xbox who helped convince Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to back a console project more than 26 years ago, told GamesBeat in an interview that he believes Microsoft is quietly sunsetting the platform under the guise of an AI-driven leadership transition. Microsoft recently announced that Asha Sharma, whose career has focused on AI and software as a service, will replace Phil Spencer as Xbox CEO, and that COO and president Sarah Bond is leaving the company. Blackley said he expects Sharma's role to be that of "a palliative care doctor who slides Xbox gently into the night," arguing that Satya Nadella's all-consuming bet on generative AI has turned every business unit -- Xbox included -- into a nail for the same hammer. He compared the appointment to putting someone who doesn't like movies in charge of a major motion pic...

Hacker Used Anthropic's Claude To Steal Sensitive Mexican Data Published on 2026-02-25T19:00:00Z A hacker exploited Anthropic's AI chatbot to carry out a series of attacks against Mexican government agencies, resulting in the theft of a huge trove of sensitive tax and voter information, according to cybersecurity researchers. From a report: The unknown Claude user wrote Spanish-language prompts for the chatbot to act as an elite hacker, finding vulnerabilities in government networks, writing computer scripts to exploit them and determining ways to automate data theft, Israeli cybersecurity startup Gambit Security said in research published Wednesday. The activity started in December and continued for roughly a month. In all, 150 gigabytes of Mexican government data was stolen, including documents related to 195 million taxpayer records as well as voter records, government employee credentials and civil registry files, according to the researchers. Read more of this story a...

First British Baby Born Using Transplanted Womb From Dead Donor Published on 2026-02-25T01:30:00Z A 10-week-old boy named Hugo has become the first baby born in the UK from a womb transplanted from a deceased donor, after his mother Grace Bell -- who was born without a viable womb due to a condition called MRKH syndrome, which affects one in every 5,000 women -- underwent a 10-hour transplant operation at The Churchill Hospital in Oxford in June 2024. Hugo was born just before Christmas 2025, weighing nearly 7lbs, at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in west London, following IVF treatment and embryo transfer at The Lister Fertility Clinic. Bell's transplant is one of three completed so far as part of a UK clinical research trial that plans to carry out 10 such procedures from deceased donors, and Hugo is the first baby born from any of them. Earlier in 2025, a separate effort produced baby Amy, the first UK birth from a living womb donation -- her mother had received he...

New Datacentres Risk Doubling Great Britain's Electricity Use, Regulator Says Published on 2026-02-24T21:00:00Z The amount of power being sought by new datacentre projects in Great Britain would exceed the national current peak electricity consumption, according to an industry watchdog. From a report: Ofgem said about 140 proposed datacentre schemes, driven by use of artificial intelligence, could require 50 gigawatts of electricity -- 5GW more than the country's current peak demand. The figure was revealed in an Ofgem consultation on demand for new connections to the power grid. It pointed to a "surge in demand" for connection applications between November 2024 and June last year, with a significant number coming from datacentres. This has exceeded even the most ambitious forecasts. Meanwhile, new renewable energy projects are not being connected to the grid at the pace they are being built to help meet the government's clean energy targets by the end of the de...

CrowdStrike Says Attackers Are Moving Through Networks in Under 30 Minutes Published on 2026-02-24T20:00:00Z An anonymous reader shares a report: Cyberattacks reached victims faster and came from a wider range of threat groups than ever last year, CrowdStrike said in its annual global threat report released Tuesday, adding that cybercriminals and nation-states increasingly relied on predictable tactics to evade detection by exploiting trusted systems. The average breakout time -- how long it took financially-motivated attackers to move from initial intrusion to other network systems -- dropped to 29 minutes in 2025, a 65% increase in speed from the year prior. "The fastest breakout time a year ago was 51 seconds. This year it's 27 seconds," Adam Meyers, head of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told CyberScoop. Defenders are falling behind because attackers are refining their techniques, using social engineering to access high-privilege systems faster and mov...

Hegseth Gives Anthropic Until Friday To Back Down on AI Safeguards Published on 2026-02-24T19:00:00Z Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei until Friday evening to give the military unfettered access to its AI model or face harsh penalties, Axios has learned. Hegseth told Amodei in a tense meeting on Tuesday that the Pentagon will either cut ties and declare Anthropic a "supply chain risk," or invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to tailor its model to the military's needs. The Pentagon wants to punish Anthropic as the feud over AI safeguards grows increasingly nasty, but officials are also worried about the consequences of losing access to its industry-leading model, Claude. "The only reason we're still talking to these people is we need them and we need them now. The problem for these guys is they are that good," a Defense official told Axios ahead of the meeting. Anthropic has said it is willing to adapt its usa...

ASML Unveils EUV Light Source Advance That Could Yield 50% More Chips By 2030 Published on 2026-02-23T21:57:00Z An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Researchers at ASML Holding say they have found a way to boost the power of the light source in a key chip making machine to turn out up to 50% more chips by decade's end, to help retain the Dutch company's edge over emerging U.S. and Chinese rivals. ASML is the world's only maker of commercial extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, a critical tool for chipmakers such as TSMC, Intel and others in producing advanced computing chips. "It's not a parlor trick or something like this, where we demonstrate for a very short time that it can work," Michael Purvis, ASML's lead technologist for its EUV source light, said in an interview. "It's a system that can produce 1,000 watts under all the same requirements that you could see at a customer," he added, speaking at the company...

IBM Shares Crater 13% After Anthropic Says Claude Code Can Tackle COBOL Modernization Published on 2026-02-23T21:10:00Z IBM shares plunged nearly 13% on Monday after Anthropic published a blog post arguing that its Claude Code tool could automate much of the complex analysis work involved in modernizing COBOL, the decades-old programming language that still underpins an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the United States and runs on the kind of mainframe systems IBM has sold for generations. Anthropic said the shrinking pool of developers who understand COBOL had long made modernization cost-prohibitive, and that AI could now flip that equation by mapping dependencies and documenting workflows across thousands of lines of legacy code. The sell-off deepened a rough 2026 for IBM, whose shares are now down more than 22% year to date. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linus Torvalds: Someone 'More Competent Who Isn't Afraid of Numbers Past the Teens' Will Take Over Linux One Day Published on February 24, 2026 at 01:06AM Linus Torvalds has pondered his professional mortality in a self-deprecating post to mark the release of the first release candidate for version 7.0 of the Linux kernel. From a report: "You all know the drill by now: two weeks have passed, and the kernel merge window is closed," he wrote in the post announcing Linux 7.0 rc1. "We have a new major number purely because I'm easily confused and not good with big numbers." Torvalds pointed out that the numbers he applies to new kernel releases are essentially meaningless. "We haven't done releases based on features (or on "stable vs unstable") for a long, long time now. So that new major number does *not* mean that we have some big new exciting feature, or that we're somehow leaving old interfaces behind. It's the usual ...

'How Many AIs Does It Take To Read a PDF?' Published on February 24, 2026 at 12:20AM Despite AI's progress in building complex software, the ubiquitous PDF remains something of a grand challenge -- a format Adobe developed in the early 1990s to preserve the precise visual appearance of documents. PDFs consist of character codes, coordinates, and rendering instructions rather than logically ordered text, and even state-of-the-art models asked to extract information from them will summarize instead, confuse footnotes with body text, or outright hallucinate contents, The Verge writes. Companies like Reducto are now tackling the problem by segmenting pages into components -- headers, tables, charts -- before routing each to specialized parsing models, an approach borrowed from computer vision techniques used in self-driving vehicles. Researchers at Hugging Face recently found roughly 1.3 billion PDFs sitting in Common Crawl alone, and the Allen Institute for AI has noted that...

Long Before Tech CEOs Turned To Layoffs To Cover AI Expenses, There Was WorldCom Published on February 23, 2026 at 03:04AM Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Jeopardy time. A. This company spurred CEOs to make huge speculative capital expenditures based on wild unverified claims of future demand, resulting in the layoffs of tens of thousands of workers to reduce the resulting expenses, harming their core businesses. Q. What is OpenAI? Sorry, the correct response is, "What is WorldCom?" In 2002, WorldCom, the second largest long-distance company in the U.S., entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy after disclosing accounting fraud that eventually totaled $11 billion, the biggest ever at the time. CEO Bernard Ebbers was subsequently sentenced to 25 years in prison. CNBC reported that an employee of WorldCom's Internet service provider UUNet set off a frenzy of speculative investment and infrastructure overbuild after he used Excel to create a best-case scenario model for the ...

'Open Source Registries Don't Have Enough Money To Implement Basic Security' Published on February 23, 2026 at 02:04AM Google and Microsoft contributed $5 million to launch Alpha-Omega in 2022 — a Linux Foundation project to help secure the open source supply chain. But its co-founder Michael Winser warns that open source registries are in financial peril, reports The Register, since they're still relying on non-continuous funding from grants and donations. And it's not just because bandwidth is expensive, he said at this year's FOSDEM. "The problem is they don't have enough money to spend on the very security features that we all desperately need..." In a follow-up LinkedIn exchange after this article had posted, Winser estimated it could cost $5 million to $8 million a year to run a major registry the size of Crates.io, which gets about 125 billion downloads a year. And this number wouldn't include any substantial bandwidth and infrastructu...

Researchers Develop Detachable Crawling Robotic Hand Published on February 23, 2026 at 01:04AM Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot writes: Researchers have developed a robotic hand that can not only skitter about on its fingertips, it can also bend its fingers backward, connect and disconnect from a robotic arm, and pick up and carry one or more objects at a time. This article in Science News includes footage of the robotic arm reattaching itself to the skittering robot hand, which can also hold objects against both sides of its palm simultaneously, and "can even unscrew the cap off a mustard bottle while holding the bottle in place." With its unusual agility, it could navigate and retrieve objects in spaces too confined for human hands. When attached to the mechanical arm, the robotic hand could pick up objects much like a human hand. The bot pinched a ball between two fingers, wrapped four fingers around a metal rod and held a flat disc between fingers and palm. But the...

AI Now Helps Manage 16% of America's Apartments Published on February 23, 2026 at 12:04AM Imagine a 280-unit apartment complex offering no on-site leasing office with a human agent for questions. "Instead, the entire process has been outsourced to AI..." reports SFGate, "from touring to signing the lease to completing management tasks once you actually move in." Now imagine it's far more than just one apartment complex... At two other Jack London Square apartment buildings, my initial interactions were also with a robot. At the Allegro, my fiance and I entered the leasing office for our tour and asked for "Grace P," the leasing agent who had emailed us. "Oh, that's just our AI assistant," the woman at the front desk told us... At Aqua Via, another towering apartment complex across the street, I emailed back and forth with a very helpful and polite "Sofia M." My pal Sofia seemed so human-like in her responses that I did not...

America's Peace Corps Announces 'Tech Corps' Volunteers to Help Bring AI to Foreign Countries Published on February 22, 2026 at 03:13AM Over 240,000 Americans volunteered for Peace Corps projects in 142 countries since the program began more than half a century ago. But now the agency is launching a new initiative — called Tech Corps. "It's the Peace Corps, but make it AI," explains Engadget: The Peace Corps' latest proposal will recruit STEM graduates or those with professional experience in the artificial intelligence sector and send them to participating host countries. According to the press release, volunteers will be placed in Peace Corps countries that are part of the American AI Exports Program, which was created last year from an executive order from President Trump as a way to bolster the US' grip on the AI market abroad. Tech Corps members will be tasked with using AI to resolve issues related to agriculture, education, health and economic...

Code.org President Steps Down Citing 'Upending' of CS By AI Published on February 22, 2026 at 02:05AM Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Last July, as Microsoft pledged $4 billion to advance AI education in K-12 schools, Microsoft President Brad Smith told nonprofit Code.org CEO/Founder Hadi Partovi it was time to "switch hats" from coding to AI. He added that "the last 12 years have been about the Hour of Code, but the future involves the Hour of AI." On Friday, Code.org announced leadership changes to make it so. "I am thrilled to announce that Karim Meghji will be stepping into the role of President & CEO," Partovi wrote on LinkedIn. "Having worked closely with Karim over the last 3.5 years as our CPO, I have complete confidence that he possesses the perfect balance of historical context and 'founder-level' energy to lead us into an AI-centric future." In a separate LinkedIn post, Code.org co-founder Cameron Wilson ...

T2 Linux Restores XAA In Xorg, Making 2D Graphics Fast Again Published on February 22, 2026 at 01:05AM Berlin-based T2 Linux developer René Rebe (long-time Slashdot reader ReneR) is announcing that their Xorg display server has now restored its XAA acceleration architecture, "bringing fixed-function hardware 2D acceleration back to many older graphics cards that upstream left in software-rendered mode." Older fixed-function GPUs now regain smooth window movement, low CPU usage, and proper 24-bit bpp framebuffer support (also restored in T2). Tested hardware includes ATi Mach-64 and Rage-128, SiS, Trident, Cirrus, Matrox (Millennium/G450), Permedia2, Tseng ET6000 and even the Sun Creator/Elite 3D. The result: vintage and retro systems and classic high-end Unix workstations that are fast and responsive again. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Salvation Army Opens a Digital Thrift Store On Roblox Published on February 22, 2026 at 12:04AM Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: The Salvation Army has launched what it calls the world's first digital thrift store inside Roblox, an experience named Thrift Score that lets players browse virtual racks and buy digital fashion for their avatars. While I understand the strategy of meeting Gen Z and Gen Alpha where they already spend time and money, I feel uneasy about turning something that, in the real world, often serves low income families in genuine need into a gamified aesthetic inside a video game, even if proceeds support rehabilitation and community programs, because a thrift store is not just a quirky brand concept but a lifeline for many people, and packaging that reality as entertainment creates a strange disconnect that is hard to ignore. "To be clear, proceeds from Thrift Score are intended to support The Salvation Armyâ(TM)s programs nationwide..." this...

OpenAI Has No Moat, No Tech Edge, No Lock-in and No Real Plan, Analyst Warns Published on February 21, 2026 at 02:14AM OpenAI faces four fundamental strategic problems that no amount of fundraising or capex announcements can paper over, according to analyst Benedict Evans: it has no unique technology, its enormous user base is shallow and fragile, incumbents like Google and Meta are leveraging superior distribution to close the gap, and its product roadmap is dictated by whatever the research labs happen to discover rather than by deliberate product strategy. The company claims 800-900 million weekly active users, but 80% of them sent fewer than 1,000 messages across all of 2025, averaging fewer than three prompts a day, and only 5% pay. OpenAI has acknowledged what it calls a "capability gap" between what models can do and what people use them for -- a framing Evans reads as a polite way to avoid admitting the absence of product-market fit. Gemini and Meta AI are meanwhile...

Several Meta Employees Have Started Calling Themselves 'AI Builders' Published on February 21, 2026 at 01:35AM An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta product managers are rebranding. Some are now calling themselves "AI builders," a signal that AI coding tools are changing who gets to build software inside the company. One of them, Jeremie Guedj, announced the change in a LinkedIn post last week. "I still can't believe I'm writing this: as of today, my full-time job at Meta is AI Builder," he wrote. Guedj has spent more than a decade as a traditional product manager, a role that sets the road map and strategy for products then built by engineering teams. He said that while his title in Meta's internal systems still lists him as a product manager, his actual work is now full-time building with AI on what he calls an "AI-native team." Another Meta product manager also lists "AI Builder" on her LinkedIn profile, while at leas...

AMC Theatres Will Refuse To Screen AI Short Film After Online Uproar Published on February 21, 2026 at 12:55AM An anonymous reader shares a report: When will AI movies start showing up in theaters nationwide? It was supposed to be next month. But when word leaked online that an AI short film contest winner was going to start screening before feature presentations in AMC Theatres, the cinema chain decided not to run the content. The issue began earlier this week with the inaugural Frame Forward AI Animated Film Festival announcing Igor Alferov's short film Thanksgiving Day had won the contest. The prize package for included Thanksgiving Day getting a national two-week run in theaters nationwide. When word of this began hitting social media, however, some were dismayed by the prospect of exhibitors embracing AI content, with many singling out AMC Theatres for criticism. Except the short is not actually programmed by exhibitors, exactly, but by Screenvision Media -- a third-party co...

How Streaming Became Cable TV's Unlikely Life Raft Published on February 21, 2026 at 12:15AM Cable TV providers have spent the past decade losing tens of millions of households to streaming services, but companies like Charter Communications are now slowing that exodus by bundling the very apps that once threatened to replace them. Charter added 44,000 net video subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2025, its first growth in that count since 2020, after integrating Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ directly into Spectrum cable packages -- a deal that grew out of a contentious 2023 contract dispute with Disney. Comcast and Optimum still lost subscribers in the quarter, though both saw those losses narrow. Charter's Q4 numbers also got a lift from a 15-day Disney channel blackout on YouTube TV during football season, which drove more than 14,000 subscribers to Spectrum. Charter has been discounting aggressively -- video revenue fell 10% year over year despite the subscriber gains. Cox Co...

Microsoft's New 10,000-Year Data Storage Medium: Glass Published on February 20, 2026 at 02:15AM Microsoft Research has published a paper in Nature detailing Project Silica, a working demonstration that uses femtosecond lasers to etch data into small slabs of glass at a density of over a Gigabit per cubic millimeter and a maximum capacity of 4.84 terabytes per slab. The slabs themselves are 12 cm by 12 cm and just 2 mm thick, and Microsoft's accelerated aging experiments suggest the data etched into them would remain stable for over 10,000 years at room temperature, requiring zero energy to preserve. The system writes data by firing laser pulses lasting just 10^-15 seconds to create tiny features called voxels inside the glass, each capable of storing more than one bit, and reads it back using phase contrast microscopy paired with a convolutional neural network trained to interpret the images. Writing remains the main bottleneck -- four lasers operating simultaneously achieve...